Not Applicable.
Not Applicable.
1. Field of the Invention
Mass production of identical footwear does not create footwear that could provide personalized patterns from the owner""s use of the footwear on sand, mud, or other impressible surfaces, or on a sidewalk for footwear with internal ink(s). Handcrafted footwear having soles with individual patterns have been only available to those with access to craftsmen capable of transforming a description or viewed image into a carved sole. This embodiment of the invention makes feasible mass customization that combines pre-made footwear soles with individually selected and separable patterns to produce one-of-a-kind footwear without requiring handcraft work on each such sole.
2. Description of the Related Art
Footwear, and the patterns that a sole makes, are known as a means of distinguishing one individual from another; in American literature, at least, this has been described from James Fenimore Cooper""s time onwards. Hand-crafted footwear soles were also one of the earliest media of advertising. Classicists acknowledge that one of Athens"" hetaerae had the obverse form of the Greek phrase xe2x80x9cFollow Mexe2x80x9d carved into the sole of her sandals (an examplar class of footwear), producing in the dusty and sandy streets of Periclean Athens a clear trail for literate (and thus, presumably well-off), potential clients to follow to her doorstep.
Present-day cobblers can still provide personalized, hand-designed and hand-carved soles. Mass manufacturers have provided firm names and distinctive graphical patterns on footwear soles, broadly advertising their wares through mass-production. Neither have devised a means for mass-customization of footwear soles whose functional form is differentiated by the individual customer""s requested design being incorporated as a pattern on the bottom surface of a sole. Producing footwear soles with personalized patterns specific to an ordering individual has remained a handcraft art to this day, though the material of which the sole is composed now ranges from traditional leather through rubber, old tires, and foamed light plastics. The mass manufacturers have lacked the flexibility; and the handcrafters either the skill to attain the desired graphical image or the productivity to rapidly alter the soles of a large number of sandals or other footwear.
Three-dimensional output devices now exist that can produce from a graphical image an output with that image""s form as its topmost portion. The desired image of the pattern which is to be printed by the footwear sole is produced as such an output, which is then applied to the bottom of the footwear sole in such a fashion as to produce thereupon the mirror image in the bottom of the footwear sole, so that thereafter, whenever the footwear sole is placed upon an impressionable surface, the image of the desired pattern is formed in such impressionable surface.